Bookshop West Portal: Author Readings, October 1, 2013

Featuring four WNBA–San Francisco Chapter Member / Authors with newly released novels in an amazing panel! Wine, hors d’oeuvres, FREE!

Patricia V. Davis

Join us for an intriguing evening of books and discussion, moderated by Patricia V. Davis who will introduce our stellar member authors, lead our discussion, and raffle off their books. Davis is a bestselling author and the founder of The Women’s PowerStrategy™ Conference.

In the tradition of Kristin Hannah and Karen Joy Fowler, Meg Waite Clayton, bestselling author of The Wednesday Sisters, returns with an enthralling new novel of mothers, daughters, and the secrets and dreams passed down through generations.

It is early evening when Hope Tantry arrives at the small cottage in England’s pastoral Lake District where her mother, Ally, spent the last years of her life. Ally—one of a close-knit group of women who called themselves the Wednesday Sisters—had used the cottage as a writer’s retreat while she worked on her unpublished biography of Beatrix Potter, yet Hope knows little about her mother’s time there. Traveling with Hope are friends Anna Page and Julie, first introduced as little girls in The Wednesday Sisters, now grown women grappling with issues of a different era. They’ve come to help Hope sort through her mother’s personal effects, yet what they find is a tangled family history—one steeped in Lake District lore.

Sisters Natalie and Alice Kessler were close, until adolescence wrenched them apart. Natalie is headstrong, manipulative—and beautiful; Alice is a dreamer who loves books and birds. During their family’s summer holiday at the lake, Alice falls under the thrall of a struggling young painter, Thomas Bayber, in whom she finds a kindred spirit. Natalie, however, remains strangely unmoved, sitting for a family portrait with surprising indifference. But by the end of the summer, three lives are shattered.

Decades later, Bayber, now a reclusive, world-renowned artist, unveils a never-before-seen work, Kessler Sisters—a provocative painting depicting the young Thomas, Natalie, and Alice. Bayber asks Dennis Finch, an art history professor, and Stephen Jameson, an eccentric young art authenticator, to sell the painting for him. That task becomes more complicated when the artist requires that they first locate Natalie and Alice, who seem to have vanished. And Finch finds himself wondering why Thomas is suddenly so intent on resurrecting the past.

Isolated in a remote field station in the middle of a tropical rainforest in the late 1960’s, a young woman named Kirsten rebels against traditional female roles and wages a desperate struggle for intellectual, spiritual, personal, and sexual liberation from her biologist husband who views her as a piece of property and the creatures of the rainforest as specimens to be killed, stuffed, and catalogued. The result of this tangle of adultery and relentless tropical heat leads to murder, but of an unexpected victim.

Immersion was a ground-breaking novel written in a style simultaneously cinematic, poetic, and hallucinatory.

In an era when “ecology” was a word so unfamiliar that some were still spelling it “ekology,” Mackey chose to make the ecology of the tropical rain forests of Costa Rica one of her primary themes, depicting the beauty and fragility of a complex natural ecosystem endangered by human incursions. In many ways, Kirsten seems more a woman of the early twenty-first century than a woman of her own time, and in creating her, Mackey gives us a vision of the early stages of Second Wave feminism. Immersion was the first feminist novel published by a Second Wave feminist press, and is thus quite possibly the first eco-feminist novel ever published.

It’s Thanksgiving week, 1989. We’re in Big Piney and Little Piney, two hollows near the town of Garnet in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A handful of mismatched folks – some country people, some far-flung, fancy people – discover they have one thing in common: someone they know is sick, real sick, dying sick. Their paths cross at a local hospice called Solace. Suddenly, they’re caregivers, bedside improvisers, doing all they can to beat back death or “hurry him on about his business.”

August Early has never set foot in a hospital before. Maggie Dulé packs a bag despite her vow never to return to the Pineys again. Burnice Kling, R.N., is fixing to “fire” her patient, a “cantankerous old cauliflower of a woman” and mother to an estranged daughter named Maggie. Meanwhile Cadence Greevey passes among them unnoticed. She’s a “big-little girl” whose thinking hasn’t kept up with her growing. Her mama’s ailing and there’s no one home to help.

Through chapters that interweave points of view — funny-sad and sad-funny — multiple stories become one. Steeped in the rich flavor of the Appalachians, this debut novel offers comfort in comfortless times, illuminating the altered states of shock and clarity that visit us as our loved (and hated) ones pass from this world to the next.